Vocation In the Engineering Curriculum: Challenging Students to Recognize Their Values

This work-in-progress paper describes a new initiative at the Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering to help our students integrate, and sometimes reconcile, their personal values with their engineering identity. In this paper, we describe how we are collaborating with the Office for Mission and Ministry on our campus to use the language of vocation in an engineering context to help our students develop a critical awareness about the choices they will make upon graduation. We present a brief introduction to the literature on vocation and reflection in higher education, discuss our approach to teaching this material in our first-year User-Centered Design course, and examine the impact of the activity on students through preliminary analysis of survey data. We find that students value discussion of these topics, but more work needs to be done to connect the concepts of vocation and engineering.